Freshkills Park Blog

Today marks the end of the Freshkills Park Haiku contest. Thanks to everyone who shared their thoughts and inspirations of the Park by crafting a haiku. Reading the entries–over 100 of them!–was a blast, and we are looking forward to announcing the winners on Monday. 

Last Thursday’s installment of the Freshkills Park Talks lecture series was terrific.  Ed Toth, Director of the Greenbelt Native Plant Center (GNPC), discussed the importance of floral biodiversity in urban settings, the GNPC’s history and operations–it’s one of the only municipal native plant providers in the country, if not the only one–and several citywide initiatives it’s taken on recently, including the Great Pollinator Project. 

This Saturday, Staten Island OutLOUD, a community dialogue and performance project, will be reading from the naturalist memoir Days Afield atop North Mound at the Freshkills Park site.  Days Afield, written in 1892, is a poetic exploration of Staten Island’s natural resources by naturalist, historian and Staten Island native William T.

Columbia University will be hosting The 350 Conference on climate change this Saturday. The one-day conference will focus on the need to lower carbon dioxide emissions (from the current 385 parts per million (ppm) to 350 ppm, hence the name of the conference). 

From new-fashioned eco-technologies to old-fashioned ones: Bayer Healthcare recently brought 1,450 sheep to its Richmond, California campus to graze on 17 acres of grass.  The sheep, managed by Living Systems Land Management, will live on site for two weeks and will eat close to 115,000 pounds of overgrown grass and weeds, including invasive species. 

Chargepoint is a network of electric vehicle charging stations that have been installed cities across the US and Canada.  If that wasn’t a timely and smart enough sounding business venture,  Carbon Day Automotive recently installed a Solar Powered Chargepoint station in Chicago. 

For us, supporting the creation and use of parks seems like a no-brainer. Natural preservation and appreciation, physical exercise, communal interaction–what’s not to like?  But that’s a gut response and not a data-driven one. Meanwhile, a lot of research has been conducted on the perceived and actual contributions of parks.  

Spring marks the beginning of the Freshkills Park tour season.  The tours are a chance to share the vision of Freshkills Park with the public and sometimes a prompt for the public to share its thoughts about the site with us. 

No need to keep Earth Day constrained to just one day: festivities continue through the weekend, with Earth Day New York holding a festival at Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan on Friday and Saturday.  Exhibits and representatives from environmental groups and green businesses, organic food and live music are all part of the program.

In a move to increase biodiversity within our urban jungles, the UK Green Building Council (the UK’s equivalent of the US Green Building Council) have put forth some biophilic design recommendations to policymakers, developers and urban planners that could enable wildlife to better integrate with the built environment. 

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Waste? is a new web documentary series featuring people whose livelihoods capitalize on what gets thrown away: canners scouring the streets for redeemables; engineers powering their breweries with waste water; architects constructing homes out of tires.  The series explores what motivates this type of reuse: worldviews, necessity, bottom lines. 

The construction industry produces an estimated 164 million tons of building-related waste per year, making it the single largest contributor to landfills in the US–about 20% of stateside landfill waste is construction debris.  Worldchanging reports that do-it-yourself enthusiasts in England are testing a new business model that would reclaim almost 12% of England’s construction waste by reselling materials at ”ReIY’ (Reuse It Yourself) centers. 

The Freshkills Park Talks series continues this Thursday with a talk by Ed Toth, Director of the Parks Department’s Greenbelt Native Plant Center.  The GNPC’s mission is to supply New York City’s natural areas with native plants and seeds from local plant populations. 

NYC Wildflower Week kicks off its 2nd annual celebration of all things green and wild the first week of May.  Free activities throughout the city will include botanical walks, garden tours, ecology lectures, children’s events, planting opportunities, cooking classes and food tastings.

Another case study we’re looking at: The New Jersey Meadowlands Commission (NJMC) has proposed the construction of a 5 MW solar farm to be built on top of the Erie Landfill.  This would be the largest solar array built in New Jersey to date and could potentially power up to 600 homes per year. 

Here’s great find from our archives: a November 1951 proposal for development at Fresh Kills issued under legendary Parks Commissioner Robert Moses.  The City of New York began filling in Fresh Kills in 1948, initially with the idea of depositing “clean fill” there for three years to make the land developable. 

Good news from Albany: after some early scares, $222 million dollars has been allotted this year to continue the work of the Environmental Protection Fund (EPF).  This money will ensure that state programs at zoos, botanical gardens, municipal parks, farmland and other natural areas remain intact. 

Dutch architecture firm Arons en Gelauff has won a design competition to adapt a pair of former sewage treatment silos in Amsterdam into a multi-functional cultural complex.  The design tops one of the silos with a splashy, open-rooftop playground and wraps it with a green wall. 

Another fun competition: FlyNY, in partnership with the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation, is hosting an international kite design contest. Participants will get to show off their aspiring designs and fly their kites on Saturday, May 9th on Pier I on the Hudson River. 

Republic Services, Inc. has covered portions of its Tessman Road Landfill in San Antonio, TX  with 1000 flexible, laminate-type photovoltaic (PV) solar collection strips that are configured to maximize the hours of sunlight exposure throughout the year, based on the landfill’s design and site contours.